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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and I'm a little disappointed, but I am looking to upgrade my Raspberry Pi 2 Linux PC. The new Pi has Bluetooth 4.1 and WiFi built-in. The CPU has also been upgraded to a Quad Core Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit ARMv8 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. If you want to compare that to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, it has a Quad Core Broadcom BCM2836 32-bit ARMv7 processor clocked at 900 MHz, and no wireless communication whatsoever. So why am I disappointed?

The new Pi has a 64-bit CPU, but it doesn't appear that there are any plans as of right now to also make a 64-bit edition of Raspbian Jessie. Sure, it's still only 1GB of RAM (another one of my disappointments), but there's also some performance increase with 64-bit. I suppose I could just go with ArchLinuxARM, but they're still working on moving it to the AArch64 architecture. Maybe there's something better?

If you've seen my first video on Pi Zero testing, I was unable to test current draw because the Pi was defective. No problem! I've received two more Zeros and can start testing with some realistic results. The Pi Zero is expected to use less power than the Raspberry Pi A+ and B+, but I also want to try and get that down some more. The biggest power consumers with the Pi Zero is going to be with the HDMI, Power/Activity Light, and USB. The USB is easy to reduce, I just don't plug anything in that I don't need. I'll be using a WiFi adapter with my PiZero, but only when I need to make changes. If this Pi goes into a battery powered project there will be no need for USB, HDMI, or that LED.

My Raspberry Pi Zero arrived today! Well, I actually ordered a few and this one (from Adafruit) arrived first. I'm eager to find out how embeddable this Zero is. It's small, it's unpopulated, and very stripped down. If you want to watch the video on YouTube, click here.

I'm going to solder on some GPIO headers, install Raspbian, and see how much power it's going to draw. Let's unbox this Pi!

Today, the Raspberry Pi Zero released! I haven't even heard of this until now, so it was a very pleasant Thanksgiving surprise! I'm very excited to get my hands on one of these because it fits a lot of my project needs almost perfectly (compared to the Raspberry Pi A+). It has the power of the Raspberry Pi Version 1, but it's clocked to be 40% faster. One of the things I'm excited about is not just the small size, but the unpopulated GPIO (headers not installed). I usually don't want this and am reluctant to go about removing them on a more expensive Raspberry Pi. I forgot to mention, it's cheap, at just $5. You might end up paying more to get the USB On-The-Go adapter and HDMI adapter (+ a NOOBS microSD card if you need one).

I've ordered one today, but since I heard about it a little too late it's not going to arrive until the end of December. So hopefully around the beginning of January I'll write more about this product.

I was eager to replace my old Athlon X2 5200+ desktop that I used for Linux (Primarily a Windows and Mac user here) with a Raspberry Pi 2 because the temperature in my bedroom where it was placed get's quite a bit warmer than the rest of the house. That system runs 24/7 and also takes up a lot of space! I mainly used it to do whatever I needed to do that was in Linux (not much), often that's just so I can connect back to it and use IRC from my home's network even when I'm out and about. I don't need a lot of power for that. So time to try the new Pi!